On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson thrust the United States into World War I by declaring, "The world must be made safe for democracy." For the 380,000 African American soldiers who fought and labored ...in the global conflict, these words carried life or death meaning. Relating stories bridging the war and postwar years, spanning the streets of Chicago and the streets of Harlem, from the battlefields of the American South to the battlefields of the Western Front, Chad L. Williams reveals the central role of African American soldiers in World War I and how they, along with race activists and ordinary citizens alike, committed to fighting for democracy at home and beyond.Using a diverse range of sources, Williams connects the history of African American soldiers and veterans to issues such as the obligations of citizenship, combat and labor, diaspora and internationalism, homecoming and racial violence, "New Negro" militancy, and African American historical memories of the war. Democracy may have been distant from the everyday lives of African Americans at the dawn of the war, but it nevertheless remained a powerful ideal that sparked the hopes of black people throughout the country for societal change.Torchbearers of Democracyreclaims the legacy of black soldiers and establishes the World War I era as a defining moment in the history of African Americans and peoples of African descent more broadly.
Navigating terrains of war Vigh, Henrik E
2006., 20060515, 2006, 2007., 2006-05-30, 20060101, Letnik:
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Through the concept of "social navigation," this book sheds light on the mobilization of urban youth in West Africa. Social navigation offers a perspective on praxis in situations of conflict and ...turmoil. It provides insights into the interplay between objective structures and subjective agency, thus enabling us to make sense of the opportunistic, sometimes fatalistic and tactical ways in which young people struggle to expand the horizons of possibility in a world of conflict, turmoil and diminishing resources.
At War with Women reveals how post-9/11 politics of gender and development have transformed US military power. In the mid-2000s, the US military used development as a weapon as it revived ...counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. The military assembled all-female teams to reach households and wage war through development projects in the battle for "hearts and minds." Despite women technically being banned from ground combat units, the all-female teams were drawn into combat nonetheless. Based on ethnographic fieldwork observing military trainings, this book challenges liberal feminist narratives that justified the Afghanistan War in the name of women's rights and celebrated women's integration into combat as a victory for gender equality. Jennifer Greenburg critically interrogates a new imperial feminism and its central role in securing US hegemony. Women's incorporation into combat through emotional labor has reinforced gender stereotypes, with counterinsurgency framing female soldiers as global ambassadors for women's rights. This book provides an analysis of US imperialism that keeps the present in tension with the past, clarifying where colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality have resurfaced and how they are changing today.
War stories Dwyer, Philip G
2016., 2016, 2016-11-30
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Although war memoirs constitute a rich, varied literary form, they are often dismissed by historians as unreliable. This collection of essays is the first to explore the modern war memoir, revealing ...the genre's surprising capacity for breadth and sophistication while remaining sensitive to the challenges it poses for scholars.
A stunning collection of stoic portraits and intimate
ephemera from the lives of Black Civil War soldiers
Though both the Union and Confederate armies excluded African
American men from their initial ...calls to arms, many of the men who
eventually served were black. Simultaneously, photography culture
blossomed-marking the Civil War as the first conflict to be
extensively documented through photographs. In The Black Civil
War Soldier , Deb Willis explores the crucial role of
photography in (re)telling and shaping African American narratives
of the Civil War, pulling from a dynamic visual archive that has
largely gone unacknowledged.
With over seventy images, The Black Civil War Soldier
contains a huge breadth of primary and archival materials, many of
which are rarely reproduced. The photographs are supplemented with
handwritten captions, letters, and other personal materials; Willis
not only dives into the lives of black Union soldiers, but also
includes stories of other African Americans involved with the
struggle-from left-behind family members to female spies. Willis
thus compiles a captivating memoir of photographs and words and
examines them together to address themes of love and longing;
responsibility and fear; commitment and patriotism; and-most
predominantly-African American resilience.
The Black Civil War Soldier offers a kaleidoscopic yet
intimate portrait of the African American experience, from the
beginning of the Civil War to 1900. Through her multimedia
analysis, Willis acutely pinpoints the importance of African
American communities in the development and prosecution of the war.
The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision
of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden
histories of these black Civil War soldiers. In combating the
erasure of this often overlooked history, Willis asks how these
images might offer a more nuanced memory of African-American
participation in the Civil War, and in doing so, points to
individual and collective struggles for citizenship and
remembrance.
Focuses on the home front experiences of black military families and highlights the connections that linked soldiers to their families, even during the war: how families were affected by battlefield ...events, and soldiers by events at home
A Great Sacrificeis an in-depth analysis of the effects of the Civil War on northern black families carried out using letters from northern black women-mothers, wives, sisters, and female family friends-addressed to a number of Union military officials.
Collectively, the letters give a voice to the black family members left on the northern homefront. Through their explanations and requests, readers obtain a greater apprehension of the struggles African American families faced during the war, and their conditions as the war progressed. The original letters that were received by government agencies, as well as many of the copies of the letters sent in response, are held by the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
This study is unique because it examines the effects of the war specifically on northern black families. Most other studies on African Americans during the Civil War focused almost exclusively on the soldiers.
Examines an array of letters from the families of northern black Civil War soldiers to the military bureaucracy to build a vivid portrait of the families' struggles and experiences
Nimo, Maha, Safah, Shatha, Emma, Danielle, Kim, Charlene. In a book that once again blends her distinctive flair for capturing the texture of everyday life with shrewd political insights, Cynthia ...Enloe looks closely at the lives of eight ordinary women, four Iraqis and four Americans, during the Iraq War. Among others, Enloe profiles a Baghdad beauty parlor owner, a teenage girl who survived a massacre, an elected member of Parliament, the young wife of an Army sergeant, and an African American woman soldier. Each chapter begins with a close-up look at one woman’s experiences and widens into a dazzling examination of the larger canvas of war’s gendered dimensions. Bringing to light hidden and unexpected theaters of operation—prostitution, sexual assault, marriage, ethnic politics, sexist economies—these stories are a brilliant entryway into an eye-opening exploration of the actual causes, costs, and long-range consequences of war. This unique comparison of American and Iraqi women’s diverse and complex experiences sheds a powerful light on the different realities that together we call, perhaps too easily, “the Iraq war.”
